Do you have any idea what you did to me by drawing parallels between Charles and Erik and Sir Gawain and The Green Knight? That is one of my all time favorite stories out of all the Arthurian Literature that I've read. Now the whole poem is playing out in my head. I can see Charles as Sir Gawain, whose honor, integrity and novelty mean everything to him, who is chivalrous, and noble and has a strong sense of morality. And Erik as The Green Knight; that sends shivers down my spine. The ruthlessness, danger, invincibility and sexiness that surrounds the Green Knight fits Erik like a glove... Sorry for ranting, Literature geek here. I swear I get embarrassingly excited every time I see a kindred soul...:P

On to the story: I love how you rely on your characters to make the story instead of having a defined plot shape your characters. An example of what I mean can be found in what you made Erik's nightmare. If it would have been any other writer, they would have made Erik relive a nasty experience with Shaw, perhaps the one in which he kills his mother. But what you did was much more simpler and thus ten times more effective; you showed Erik's feelings of disgust with himself in his nightmare... I truly admire that about your writing; you don't limit your characters to the plot; you build the plot around your characters.

And the intimacy between them was just perfect, not too much to make it out of character, nor too little to leave one unsatisfied. I especially love how you keep them in character even while writing such scenes. It's no easy task to write something so far away from canon (regretfully, would it have killed them to have ONE Cherik scene in there) so believably in character. Erik is hesitant about whether this is truly what Charles want, and I must say I rather like Dominant! Charles. A good change from Erik always having control of the reigns. This makes more sense as Erik being the emotionally and mentally scarred one should have aversions towards physical intimacy. Well I'll stop ranting now with the final note that I LOVED your ending. You just know when to shorten your sentences and when to make them long so that they have just the right impact on the reader.

In all I loved this, and I thank you for referring this to me. I shall continue reading more of your work tomorrow. :)

...and all of my formerly dormant memories of freshman English class return with a vengeance! (Though I doubt my teacher would've approved of Gawain and the Green Knight in this particular context, hehe) Well that was trippy and awesome and sexy and cute and dark and GREAT! (I believe that sentence about sums up Charles/Erik as well). That's cool that you two wrote it together.

oh wow! I like the writing style :) and Sir Gwain and the Green knight is my absolute favorite King Arthur story. I just found a copy of the book the other day, so when i was reading this I was so surprised. Very well done, interesting take on the writing style. It's very poetic.